|
COPYRIGHT 2001 The Dallas Morning News
Byline: Paula Felps
Mar. 29--Beth Anderson got a medical wake-up call about a year and a half ago when she realized her hands were going numb and losing strength.
"It got to where I couldn't hold on to things," says the 41-year-old administrative assistant, who lives in The Colony.
"For years, I remember my hands and wrists feeling tired at the end of the day because I was on the computer all day long. But it wasn't until they started going numb that I realized something was wrong."
For all its innovations and advancements, technology is still often accompanied by an old-fashioned bug -- repetitive stress injury, or RSI.
A higher number of computer users working at their machines for longer periods of time is adding up to an increased workload for doctors, therapists and others who deal with RSI.
"Over the last five years, I've seen it increase quite a bit," says Helen Prentice, an occupational therapist at Trinity Medical Center in Carrollton.
"The way we work has changed. Jobs in general are more specialized today. People do one task all day long. It used to be that they'd do several different things; a receptionist would answer the phone, file, type -- they used their hands in different ways. That isn't the case anymore."
Today, more work is centered around the computer. That has created a dramatic increase in RSI...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
